TI Takes Dual-Core Approach to Wireless IoT

March 15, 2017

Texas Instruments’ CC3220 SimpleLink Wi-Fi MCU has taken a dual core-approach to wireless IoT with an 80-MHz Cortex-M4, as well as a dedicated network processor with security support.

William G. Wong

Dual-core microcontrollers for the Internet of Things (IoT) are becoming more common, and this is the approach that the Texas Instruments (TI) CC3220 SimpleLink Wi-Fi MCU (Fig. 1) takes. The host processor is an 80-MHz Cortex-M4 with up to 1 Mbyte of flash storage and 256 Kbytes of RAM. It is linked to a dedicated network processor with wireless support. Wi-Fi is the initial wireless technology of choice.

The CC3210 is another version with the wireless network processor. It is controlled by an SPI link that allows developers to choose their host processor. The network processor includes a hardware crypto engine to handle secure wireless communication and secure data storage. This allows for secure wireless updates.

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1. Texas Instrumentsâ CC3220 splits IoT chores into host and communication.

The systems are supported by TI’s SimpleLink SDK (Fig. 2). This provides a common API to TI’s range of wireless microcontroller solutions that also include support for Bluetooth and sub-1 GHz wireless. TI’s software provides HomeKit support.

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2. TI RTOS, with its POSIX interface, supports TI SimpleLink SDK framework.

The SimpleLink software is built on the TI RTOS. This POSIX-compatible operating system is available for free, and the POSIX support allows other RTOSes to be substituted for TI RTOS so the wireless drivers can be used in other contexts.

The SimpleLink Launchpad (Fig. 3) is available with a CC3220. It supports the CC3220’s interfaces, including SPI, I²C, UART, SD, and camera interface. It has a full complement of timers and PWM counters. Analog support includes a 12-bit ADC.

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3. This SimpleLink Launchpad contains a CC3220 wireless chip.

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About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

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